If you need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, Beaufort's the one. The earth quakes and we consult Richter's Scale. Pain has Wong-Baker and the McGill Questionnaire. American terror looks to five bright colours on a slider of alarm, which isn't as many levels as pandemics (six phases of alert) – but then pandemics don't have the colours.
Is it frivolous to ask, in the face of all this pain and flu, just how you measure the magnitude of funny? A storm you can peg by wind power and wave action, that's an 8, Fresh Gale, breaks twigs off trees, generally impedes progress . With funny, the best you can do is a motley collection of physical responses and bodily breakdowns. A funny writer can cause you to cramp up, lose your balance, micturate. But is a book that makes you cry tears funnier than one that causes you snort and sneeze?
It's a question that comes up with W.E. Bowman's 1956 classic The Ascent of Rum Doodle . It's not as if you can really compare it to other superiorly funny books, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complain t, say, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds , Charles Portis's Norwood , except to say that each contains its own genius. (Roth might actually be more effectively gauged using the McGill Pain Questionnaire.)
I guess what you're left with is the straightforward personal testament. So. The Ascent of Rum Doodle is out-and-out the funniest book I know. When I first came across it, I registered a 153.1 on the Are You Kidding Me? scale of righteous indignation. Why wasn't it better known? This is a common response, Bill Bryson suggests in his introduction to a 2001 Rum Doodle reissue: It's not easy to comprehend how a book this fresh and frabjous could have gone missing for 30 years.
Born in Yorkshire in 1912, Bowman spent most of his career as a civil engineer. (He died in 1985.) Late in life, he sketched out a 139-word autobiography. “I appeared at Scarborough in 1911,” it begins. “In 14 the Kaiser shelled the place. In 18 my father and some others fettled the Kaiser.” After a stint in the Royal Air Force (“In 45 we fettled Hitler”), he meant to write, “but lapsed into engineering.”
In 1956, Rum Doodle met with modest success (high praise in faraway corners of The Bulawayo Gazette) and lavish indifference (no national British press). His publisher brought out a second novel, a sequel (sort of) called The Cruise of the Talking Fish (funny but nowhere near RD funny – breaks no twigs off trees). Bowman's third novel never made it to print, and a little later his publisher sank. This is when, switching to mountaineering lingo, Bowman's small oeuvre fell into a crevasse.
Published three years after Hillary and Tenzing first clambered atop Everest, Rum Doodle records an English expedition to the eponymous higher-yet Himalayan peak, a mighty eminence rising 40,000½ feet above tiny Yogistan. If you liked Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air , well, congratulations. Instead of the human spirit battling extreme conditions and dying in their teeth, think champagne and butter beans and two men sleep-wrestling in their tent, so entangling themselves that they have to be extricated by porters.
Bowman's hero, if you can call him that, is Binder. Proud, brave, loyal as a Labrador, a natural-born leader of men (just ask him), Binder is also as dense as a hiking boot. As a narrator, he's not so much unreliable as blindly idiotic. Much of the pleasure here fits into the breach between Binder's view of things (all well and good) and what's really going on (utter chaos).
Joining him is a company of six bumblers unmatched in the annals of blundering. The doctor, Prone, is perpetually ill, “smitten with mysterious and complicated symptoms,” ranging from pallor and sighing to bleeding to death from a shaving nick. (When he ices the latter wound, he comes down with frostbite and surgical shock.) Wish is the scientist; on the way to meet the mountain, he's the one who fixes the ship's position at 153 feet above sea level. Returning to Rum Doodle again, the chortling starts as soon I see the cover. We need a word for the particular pang of regret that comes from knowing you'll never again read a favourite book for the first time – “rumdoodle” might be the ticket.
